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Only cities that came of age before the advent of the car can truly be urban? Maybe the most ridiculous argument ever--even worse than the "structural density" argument (How inane is that one btw? "So what if only 2 million people live in the city, the buildings look like 3 million people live there!").

The way I see it, if your urban footprint tops out at 14 million people, and the amount of residents who live in high density areas is surpassed only by New York, you can looking any damn way you want.

That happened in Philadelphia, too. Nicetown/Tioga, Hunting Park, Overbrook, and Cobbs Creek were at one time all majority white (Jewish, Italian, or Irish) neighborhoods. And then those groups all left. And the neighborhoods fell into disrepair. However, there are still storefronts and dense urban development. It just didn't disappear because all of the whites moved away. Besides, Philadelphia has WAY more emptied out neighborhoods than Atlanta. We've lost more people since 1950 than the city of Atlanta has ever had. But you still see the urban infrastructure in those emptied out neighborhoods. It didn't all just disappear.

I said it was several factors and you focus just on one. I've already given the scenarios for two historic neighborhoods in Atlanta and the factors that were at play that caused it to lose development which include urban renewal and proposed highway construction. And again, Philly was much denser than Atlanta very early on, so even if both cities lost similar proportions of development due to disinvestment and disrepair, the loss would be much more noticeable in Atlanta because there wasn't as much to begin with when compared to a city like Philly.

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And that's still a major assumption. What makes you believe that the neighborhoods they destroyed were any more walkable than the ones still in existence?

The era in which they were built. We're talking about pre-WWII neighborhoods for the most part. Some were damaged more than others.

I said it was several factors and you focus just on one. I've already given the scenarios for two historic neighborhoods in Atlanta and the factors that were at play that caused it to lose development.

But that doesn't mean dense, "walkable" development. You're assuming that all of the walkable neighborhoods were razed, leaving behind only the auto-centric, less walkable ones. That seems far-fetched.

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Originally Posted by Mutiny77

The era in which they were built. We're talking about pre-WWII neighborhoods for the most part. Some were damaged more than others.

There are plenty of pre-WWII neighborhoods that are not "walkable" in the sense many people think of the term. Many of them are in fact very auto-centric. Many of the homes built around Emory were built before the war, but few people (even Atlantans) would consider those neighborhoods "walkable."

This then feeds into a cycle where that initial blow then fuels much further abandonment which then causes the whole area to be devalued and then even further abandoned until it becomes fit for urban renewal plans which considered the density of years past to be unhealthful or for the area to be more profitable as parking lots, empty lots, or newer more suburban/automobile oriented forms. All cities had to deal with these, but older, larger cities had enough critical mass to take these blows and to sustain themselves in some form while smaller cities did not.

Could you provide a source for this? Because I feel like you're hypothesizing without really citing anything to back it up.

From everything I've read, Los Angeles' core was largely designed around the automobile. It's not that they had to knock down all sorts of dense, pedestrian-friendly development to make way for it. By the time Los Angeles really began to grow, the automobile was already in mass production. And streetcars (which again are basically buses) had the same dispersing effect on the urban core.

You also have to remember that LA had a very different development pattern from eastern cities. It was not like Boston where you had years of population growth in the "core" that eventually spilled out into the outer areas after the emergence of the streetcar. The streetcar allowed inner Los Angeles (the "core"), its outer areas (the Valley), and its suburbs to all develop at once.

Only cities that came of age before the advent of the car can truly be urban? Maybe the most ridiculous argument ever--even worse than the "structural density" argument (How inane is that one btw? "So what if only 2 million people live in the city, the buildings look like 3 million people live there!").

The way I see it, if your urban footprint tops out at 14 million people, and the amount residents who live in high density areas is surpassed only by New York, you can looking and damn way you want.

I'm sorry but your ideology makes no since. More structure density means narrower streets which equals more walkability and a more urban environment. This is the reason why LA gets slammed for not being urban due to its wide streets (which hurts LA walkability) and other horrible urban layout factors such as LA's gigantic front lawns that set houses far back from the street.

Right because D.C. is more urban than Philly? LOL what are you talking about. How does a place with 50% more land area than SF or Boston NOT manage to pull ahead in population or density?

Want the answer Chandler? D.C. is NOT as urban as SF, Boston, and especially Philly. You haven't been to Philly have you? If you did then you wouldn't be saying these silly things like D.C. and LA being as urban. There are streets in Philly where Chris Farley himself couldnt walk thru because of how narrow they are built

Could you provide a source for this? Because I feel like you're hypothesizing without really citing anything to back it up.

From everything I've read, Los Angeles' core was largely designed around the automobile. It's not that they had to knock down all sorts of dense, pedestrian-friendly development to make way for it. By the time Los Angeles really began to grow, the automobile was already in mass production. And streetcars (which again are basically buses) had the same dispersing effect on the urban core.

You also have to remember that LA had a very different development pattern from eastern cities. It was not like Boston where you had years of population growth in the "core" that eventually spilled out into the outer areas after the emergence of the streetcar. The streetcar allowed inner Los Angeles (the "core"), its outer areas (the Valley), and its suburbs to all develop at once.

That's sort of funny--I actually read that book several years ago while I was living in LA. It's interesting in that it shows a lot of massive growth with the rise of the automobile, but it also talks about the transformation and kinetic pace of development that happened due to that rise. In there, you'll find that it talks about the downtown core and the already rapidly rising population of LA prior to the automobile's de facto rule of the city, but that the mass usage of it prompted a really strong acceleration.

In that book, you'll find that LA was the fastest growing metro in the whole US from the late 1800s until the early 1900s and a good chunk of that growth was before real automobile dominance that grew rapidly in the 20s and the 30s (where automobiles and other forms of transit were competing with the auto steadily winning out) and then finally almost complete dominance. There was still quite a bit of population when transit aside from automobiles became dominant and that was much of the core (so it's not entirely right to say the core was built with the automobile in mind)--however, that doesn't mean too much because LA also later embarked on a lot of demolition of its core (the book has a good amount to say about how the dense central region and the fairly dense westside and east la regions afterwards quickly had their population shares collapse as auto-oriented suburbs took over in growth) due to suburbanization and dereliction in the core as well as projects to build freeways and to widen several arterial roads as well as the leveling several of the hills within downtown (along with the development on them) to make for easier transit through the city. LA basically developed, and in many cases, redeveloped really rapidly in both the streetcar era (which included a lot of walking since streetcars aren't generally door to door commutes, so kept themselves as walkable communities) and the automobile era, but the automobile era went on much longer so you have the almost 4 million population that's there now (LA's own estimates have the city currently past 4 million with the census having done a significant undercount).

LA emptied out its core just like a lot of other cities did, but kept some of it. It also ended up consistently growing in population and having a large and ambitious immigrant population that took up some of the derelict core.

Right because D.C. is more urban than Philly? LOL what are you talking about. How does a place with 50% more land area than SF or Boston NOT manage to pull ahead in population or density?

Want the answer Chandler? D.C. is NOT as urban as SF, Boston, and especially Philly. You haven't been to Philly have you? If you did then you wouldn't be saying these silly things like D.C. and LA being as urban. There are streets in Philly where Chris Farley himself couldnt walk thru because of how narrow they are built

Did you miss the post above where Mr Nonsense already put himself on record that structural density is irrelevant to how urban a city is? According to him the Dharavi slum in Mumbai is more urban than Manhattan because it's got a higher population density.

Right because D.C. is more urban than Philly? LOL what are you talking about. How does a place with 50% more land area than SF or Boston NOT manage to pull ahead in population or density?

Want the answer Chandler? D.C. is NOT as urban as SF, Boston, and especially Philly. You haven't been to Philly have you? If you did then you wouldn't be saying these silly things like D.C. and LA being as urban. There are streets in Philly where Chris Farley himself couldnt walk thru because of how narrow they are built

I never said it was more urban, i said its less sprawling Philly and Boston's urban areas, which is factually correct. That's the beauty of facts --there's no opinion to them.

What's funny is, you NE boosters keep trying to knock L.A. down a peg by claiming its a giant suburb, yet it's core is actually denser than either Boston or Philly. Amazing--these NE cities live for their dense cores, and they can't even beat polycentric, wide boulevard Los Angeles in core density? Wtf? Facts are your worst nightmare.

Urban isnt exactly as simple as I thought it was. I figured, you had rows of buildings or houses, powerlines steel and concrete structures, graffiti, sirens aswell as other sounds of the city. Street vendors pushing ice cream carts and a corner store..

Urban. Atleast where I'm from..

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